Thursday, April 23, 2009

Anti-Miscegenation Laws: A Precursor to Gay Marriage Bans?

So I was thinking about this map of the future of gay marriage, and wondering about what sort of precedents there might be in American social history for the sort of change involved in allowing gay couples to marry. And the best parallel to the legalization of gay marriage I can think of is the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws. Here's a map of the history of the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws.

There are obviously a ton of differences between the social acceptance of interracial marriages and the social acceptance of same-sex marriages. For one thing, the history of relations between races varies considerably between different regions of the country. But the basic shift in perceptions that undergird both expansions of social acceptance is pretty much the same: in both cases, the institution of marriage expands to include relationships that had once been seen as taboo. And the maps of the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws and the predicted failure of gay marriage bans (shown below) show a lot of correlation. In both cases, the socially progressive view takes hold first in the Northeast, and the South is the last holdout. In fact, every single state in the South continued to ban inter-racial marriage until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967. It wouldn't surprise me terribly if a lot of Southern states continue to hold out against same-sex marriage until a comparable future Supreme Court decision.

But there are differences, too. The Western states - hypothetical early adopters of the legalization of gay marriage - were relatively slow to sanction interracial marriage. And the Midwest, especially the "prairie populism" states of the Upper Midwest, were early in sanctioning interracial marriage, but are predicted to be slower on the same-sex marriage front. (Of course, Iowa has already become the fourth state to legalize gay marriage - before any Western state - so history may yet repeat itself.)

And, of course, the time scales are radically different: it took nearly 200 years between the first state ban on interracial marriage to be lifted (Pennsylvania, in 1780) and the Supreme Court decision that ended such bans once and for all. And the progress was very fitful. After Pennsylvania, no marriage ban was lifted until 1843; 44 years later, ever Northern Union state other than Indiana had lifted their bans. But then - nothing, literally for generations. The post-Reconstruction period of racist retrenchment, aka Jim Crow, saw a total lack of progress in the states on interracial marriage. It wasn't until the modern Civil Rights era that interracial marriage bans again started to be overturned. And even by the time of the Loving decision, the country was still deeply bifurcated: every single non-Southern or border state had repealed their marriage bans, and every single Southern state still had a ban on the books.

Are there lessons to be drawn here about the future of same-sex marriage? One would seem to be that progressive change is not inexorable; or if it is, it can still be delayed by quite a lot, as the 1887 to 1948 lacuna in repealing marriage bans shows. And, though the generational divide on gay marriage is really stark, according to polls like this one, which found that 41% of people under 45 support same-sex marriage, as opposed to 18% of people over 65, even young people are only split on the issue, so it would seem wrong to view the inexorable spread of marriage equality as a fait accompli.

Nonetheless, I think there are good reasons to think that an outcome in which same-sex marriage becomes broadly accepted within a generation is likely. In particular, that same poll shows 60-35% support for either same-sex marriage or civil unions. That seems to suggest that, despite some lingering apprehension about what some people see as a re-definition of marriage, there is broad support for the principle of equality for gay couples. There's no reason to expect that support to reverse itself. The taboo on gay relationships is on the way out the door, and I can't help but think that it's only a matter of time before the law reflects this reality.

Here, by the way, are the dates when anti-miscegenation laws were repealed, according to Wikipedia.

46 comments:

Good article, but very poor map of the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws. Firstly the colours for 1865-1887 and 1948-1959 are indiscernible. Secondly the use of jpg makes the map unnecessarily blurry, use png. Finally the map should have used the same 5 time periods mentioned in the article: never enacted, 1780, 1843-1887, 1948-1967 and June 12, 1967.

I do know that Massachusetts has a law from the 1910s that says that couples from other states can only get married there if their state will recognize their marriage. They didn't want interracial couples from certain other states to get married there and then expect their home state to recognize the union. So when MA allowed gay marriages in 2005, it couldn't be a haven for gay couples from all over to get married.

Chris - I did my best to make the colors stand out as much as possible. Beyond that, I'm just sort of figuring out a good method for making these sorts of maps; any advice is welcome.

As for the date ranges, I chose them to resonate with significant time periods in the history of race relations in the US as best I could. So the periods indicated are, roughly, pre-Civil War/Emancipation; post-Civil War 19th Century (including Reconstruction); and then early and late adopters during the mid-20th Centuury Civil Rights era (with a more or less arbitrary cutoff between the two). And then, of course, the date of Loving v. Virginia. I think those date ranges make intuitive sense for this particular data set, though arguably Pennsylvanis does belong in its own category.

Anon - I sort of think of Maryland as a once-southern state that is now, for all intents and purposes, northern. But for the purposes of this post, I consider it a border state.

I've been looking for information on a racial break-down of repealed miscegenation laws. I know that there were on the books laws forbidding interracial marriages between native Americans, Asians, Hispanic etal. All the info I've seen so far has dealt with Black and White marriages. Anything on the other colours?

Article in The New Yorker, Jan.18, 2010 edition stated South Carolina and Alabama didn't overturn anti-miscegenation laws until 1998 and 2000, respectively. I trust this source more than I do wikipedia.

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A useful map but perhaps misleading in one regard. All the southern states listed as repealing their anti-miscegenation laws in 1967 did not actually do so. The federal case of Loving vs. Virginia, decided in 1967, superseded state laws and effectively put an end to anti-miscegenation laws in the US however many states did not actually take the statutes off their books until much later. For example Mississippi maintained its anti-miscegenation legislation into the 1980's. For the question that you're addressing a more interesting map would be the dates when the state legislatures themselves bothered to repeal their own laws.

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I would be aware that as somebody who really doesn’t comment to blogs a lot (in actual fact, this may be my first put up), I don’t think the time period “lurker” is very flattering to a non-posting reader.